German Migration to Brazil After Major World Wars & Assimilation

Not all Germans who settled in Brazil became farmers. In the early 20th century most of the Germans immigrated to Brazil settled in big towns. Some of them settled in the old rural German colonies as well. The German immigration to Brazil had its largest numbers during the 1920s, after World War I. These Germans were mostly middle-class laborers from the urban areas of Germany.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Brazil also attracted a significant number of German Jews, who settled mostly in Sao Paulo. During the Nazi period and thereafter until the ban on emigration came into effect in 1941, some 100,000 Jews from Central Europe, the majority of them were German speaking moved to South America. Most of them nearly ninety percent moved towards Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Chile.

Many immigrant Germans were not counted in the early censuses. Often the spouses of immigrants were not listed as having entered into the country.

During the Second World War Brazilian ships were attacked by Germans and influenced by the US government, Brazil declared war against Germany. Brazil feared whether the German community in Brazil could rebel against the government.

President Getulio Vargas initiated a strict program of forced cultural assimilation - Nacionalismo- that worked quite efficiently. He forbade any manifestation of the German culture in Brazil. German schools were closed, houses with German architecture were destroyed and the use of the German language in Brazil was also forbidden with the publication of German newspapers (together with Italian and Japanese).

Since then, the southern Brazilian German regional language and culture was in decline. Some decried it as a tragic loss for the country while others felt that this meant national progress, saying assimilation will ultimately lead to a feeling of "getting together".

Many Germans also adopted voluntarily from German to the national languages mainly for their safety. Germans in other parts of Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe adopted this pattern of language change to avoid the anger of the Governments which were against or fought against Germany.

With this change in situation the members of the German minorities, previously communities of status and prestige, were turned into undesirable minorities though there were widespread elements of sympathy for Germans in many of the South American countries.

When Germanic immigrants first arrived in Brazil starting at the beginning of the 1800's they did not identify themselves as a unified German - Brazilian group. However, as time went on this common regional identity emerged for many different geo-socio-political reasons and was the major cause for their victimization as well.

After natural and forcible assimilation, Germans in Brazil currently speak a variety of German dialects in the south of the country. These German dialects originated from a variety of German dialects which were spoken by the German immigrants from Germany, Switzerland and Austria with the foreign borrowings from other immigrant languages especially Italian, Spanish, Japanese and the Brazil's national language, Portuguese.

The most dominant spoken Brazilian German dialect is Riograndenser Hunsruckisch, a Brazilian variation of the Hunsruckisch dialect of German. But other dialects are also spoken as well, like the Austrian dialect spoken in Dreizehnlinden, Pomeranian (Pommersch or Plautdietsch) dialect spoken by ethnic German Mennonites from the former Soviet Union and Danube Swabian (Donauschwabisch) dialect.

Although Riograndenser Hunsruckisch has long been the most widely spoken German dialect in southern Brazil, it is currently experiencing a very strong decline. A strong stigma has been forming around the public use of this language. Today it is spoken mostly in private, in family circles and by the elder members of the community and in the rural areas. It is very common for people not to admit that they know it. They speak it in their most private environs, although there are cities where you can hear German on streets or parks.